forth.  She was worshipped by men habited as women and vice-versa; for which reason in the Torah (Deut. xx. 5) the sexes are forbidden to change dress.  The male prostitutes were called Kadesh the holy, the women being Kadeshah, and doubtless gave themselves up to great excesses.  Eusebius (De bit.  Const. iii. c. 55) describes a school of impurity at Aphac, where women and “men who were not men” practiced all manner of abominations in honour of the Demon (Venus).  Here the Phrygian symbolism of Kybele and Attis (Atys) had become the Syrian Ba’al Tammuz and Astarte, and the Grecian Dionaea and Adonis, the anthropomorphic forms of the two greater lights.  The site, Apheca, now Wady al-Afik on the route from Bayrut to the Cedars, is a glen of wild and wondrous beauty, fitting frame-work for the loves of goddess and demigod:  and the ruins of the temple destroyed by Constantine contrast with Nature’s work, the glorious fountain, splendidior vitro, which feeds the River Ibrahim and still at times Adonis runs purple to the sea.[FN#394]

The Phoenicians spread this androgynic worship over Greece.  We find the consecrated servants and votaries of Corinthian Aphrodite called Hierodouli (Strabo viii. 6), who aided the ten thousand courtesans in gracing the Venus-temple:  from this excessive luxury arose the proverb popularised by Horace.  One of the headquarters of the cult was Cyprus where, as Servius relates (Ad AEn. ii. 632), stood the simulacre of a bearded Aphrodite with feminine body and costume, sceptered and mitred like a man.  The sexes when worshipping it exchanged habits and here the virginity was offered in sacrifice:  Herodotus (i. c. 199) describes this defloration at Babylon but sees only the shameful part of the custom which was a mere consecration of a tribal rite.  Everywhere girls before marriage belong either to the father or to the clan and thus the maiden paid the debt due to the public before becoming private property as a wife.  The same usage prevailed in ancient Armenia and in parts of Ethiopia; and Herodotus tells us that a practice very much like the Babylonian “is found also in certain parts of the Island of Cyprus:”  it is noticed by Justin (xviii. c. 5) and probably it explains the “Succoth Benoth” or Damsels’ booths which the Babylonians bans planted to the cities of Samaria.[FN#395] The Jews seem very successfully to have copied the abominations of their pagan neighbours, even in the matter of the “dog."[FN#396] In the reign of wicked Rehoboam (B.C. 975) “There were also sodomites in the land and they did according to all the abominations of the nations which the Lord cast out before the children of Israel” (I Kings xiv. 20).  The scandal was abated by zealous King Asa (B.C. 958) whose grandmother[FN#397] was high-priestess of Priapus (princeps in sacris Priapi):  he took away the sodomites out of the land” (I Kings xv.  I2).  Yet the prophets were loud in their complaints, especially the so-called Isaiah